This chapter covers the post-Reconstruction period and the Supreme Court’s rejection of laws to protect Blacks’ use of “public accommodations” on an equal basis with Whites, and the Court’s later upholding of Jim Crow laws that required segregation of Blacks and Whites. Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, barring discrimination against Blacks’ access to places such as restaurants, theaters, hotels, and railway coaches. Ruling in 1883 in five cases from Kansas, California, Tennessee, New York, and Missouri under the caption of Civil Rights Cases, the Court struck down the “public accommodations” provision, holding that “private” businesses could not be regulated without a showing of “state action” in their operation. This ruling drew a sharp dissent from Justice John Marshall Harlan, who argued that businesses serving the public are subject to regulation. The chapter also recounts violent White resistance to Black voting, with South Carolina senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman as leader of a White group known as Red Shirts in murdering Blacks. The chapter concludes with discussion of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1895, holding that Louisiana could provide “separate but equal” railway coaches for Blacks and Whites, over another solitary dissent by Justice Harlan, arguing the Constitution is “color-blind” and protects Blacks from state-imposed discrimination.
